wedding | mixed feelings

Our wedding day was one of the most awesome days ever! Obviously marrying the love of my life was amazing but on top of that the support and love of some very special people made the day one that just felt like a party all about love. In all honesty, however, I mostly hated the whole wedding process and I wanted to talk about that here because I don’t feel like it is something I have seen shared or discussed very much (at least on the blogs that I read).

For months in the run up to the wedding my anxiety levels had been higher than I ever remember them being. I was sleeping badly. I was feeling unmotivated. I wasn’t looking forward to my wedding. Of course I couldn’t wait to pledge the rest of my life to a man that I deeply love but I only seemed to get a pit in my stomach when thinking about our wedding day rather than a bubbling over with excitement reaction.

I found this confusing and frustrating. This was not what I had imagined and it was certainly not what the internet had suggested I would feel about my wedding day!

I’ve been pondering why I have felt this way and thought that I would share. Maybe I am not the only one.

>>> Perhaps most importantly, our wedding day changed drastically from its original conception. When Tim proposed out of the blue we both decided we were not keen on a big wedding and decided that we would “kind of elope”. We started planning a very small wedding with parents and siblings in Rome. I was incredibly excited about this because it felt really intimate and … hello Rome! Anyway that turned out not to be feasible and with us moving to Italy shortly afterwards anyway it seemed to make sense to have the wedding where we could celebrate with more of our friends. We kept the ceremony smallish but now we also had to plan a party. I guess the same might happen if your family feel they have a strong say in what is happening with your wedding.

>>> Weddings are stressful. They cost a lot of money. You have to ‘entertain’ a bunch of people. As someone who wanted people to enjoy themselves on the wedding day (which I don’t think is an unusual request) it creates a lot of pressure. Not being in the country added some stress. Not having a job definitely added more, particularly when costs started to rise.

>>> A lot of special people were not able to make our day. I suppose that will always be the case when you live thousands of miles from the place you were born. I obviously do not hold against them the fact that they weren’t there and everyone who attended is very special to me too but at points I kind of wondered ‘what was the point’.

I am glad to say that in the month leading up to my wedding I started to focus less on all the money we were spending and more on the beautiful day we were going to have. (Although the week before the wedding was also pretty full on and exhausting too).

It kind of started when we sat down and wrote our vows together. This really helped to solidify what the day was all about. We also decided that in the gap between the ceremony and the reception we would take time for ourselves. Although a wedding is a public declaration of your intent to stay together for the rest of your lives it was important for us to also have time alone to celebrate with just the two of us.

I also really started to relax once I had tried on my wedding dress for the first time (less than four weeks from the wedding day). I went one Sunday when I was in London to my friend who was making it and over the course of the day she sewed and I pulled the dress on and off about 100 times. I had never doubted her abilities but was concerned that this dress that we had kind of created from our minds would in the end be awful. And occasionally I would doubt my choice of colour. But when I tried it on for the last time at the fitting I knew I had made the right decisions. Big sigh of relief.

I’ve heard that planning the wedding can be a real test of a relationship and though we did have some arguments (honestly around things that we have argued about before and will probably be the same arguments we have for rest of our lives) I think in the end the experience has brought us closer together. So not too bad in the end.

Have you had the same feelings? Or the opposite? I’d love to hear

(Picture is a screen grab from some video footage taken by a friend. Photos will still be a while.)

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